Appealing and effective web design is key to the success of your business in the online sphere. The amount of time and effort you put into representing your brand will ultimately determine how your customers feel about you. You probably know this and have already put a great deal of resources towards developing your website.
However, something seems to be going wrong. Perhaps you’re not getting as much traffic as you’d like to. Maybe plenty of people are coming to your website, but you’re not seeing any conversions. Chances are, your web design is to blame. There could be a number of reasons for this, so let’s find out where to look and how to remedy each potential issue.
By modern standards, websites need to be clean, consistent and clutter-free. If you have ads all over the place, random color schemes or a general lack of cohesion between pages, your visitors won’t be impressed. Users also need to know that they’re on the same website when navigating between pages, so keep the primary design language consistent.
Everything from books to newspapers have sufficient amount of white space around text, images and other design elements. This also applies to the layout of your website. If you don’t have enough white space, things start to look crammed and distracting.
An overwhelming design makes it difficult to communicate with your customers. Aim for minimalism and avoid incorporating elements that don’t add value or help sell your product.
If your visitors struggle to find what they’re looking for, it’ll be all the reason they need to move on. Having an efficient and user-friendly navigation system is important - something WordPress fails to achieve just out of the box.
This is because it adds a new category to your primary menu every time, which can quickly become messy. Fortunately, WordPress provides all the tools you need to create your own structure.
The content, layout and design elements of your website should be based around your target audience. Once you understand who they are and what makes them tick, you can better determine how to show that your product can fulfill their desires or needs. Without this knowledge, there’s no way of knowing how to capture your visitors attention.
You can use tools such as Hubspot and Google Analytics to see who’s visiting your website, where they’re from and what devices they’re using. Take a look at your traffic and how many leads are coming from it. The more you know about your visitors, the better you can tailor your web design and content to reflect the needs of your target audience.
A call to action is key to helping your visitors understand what response you want from them. If it’s not clearly shown or doesn’t exist to begin with, it could be why you’re not getting conversions. Your call to action should be visible, but not overly intrusive. This is especially true for pop-ups, where there’s a fine line between informative and annoying.
Filling out your forms should be a quick and easy process, only requiring essential information. Too many fields and people will lose interest. In the same light, be sure to make your subscription options enticing by offering something your customers want. Just like with your layout, keeping it simple is key to success.
There’s a reason certain types of businesses stick to certain colors for their branding. It may seem like a detail too minor to matter, but colors play a significant role in the way people perceive your products.
Be sure to brush up on your knowledge of color theory in order to create the ideal combination for your brand. Your colors should be consistent, easy on the eyes and conductive to the type of response you want from your audience.
Just like not having a visible call to action could detriment your bottom line, not making it easy for visitors to share your content could leave you missing out on a ton of exposure. Your visitors are an excellent marketing resource. When they share your content on social media, you’re basically getting free advertising.
This is why it’s important to have your sharing buttons easily available, both for your main page and for each post you make on your blog. There are numerous social sharing tools to choose from. Some of the best include additional features such as tracking and analytics that can help you gauge just how well they’re working.
There’s nothing more annoying than a website that’s impossible to navigate on a mobile device. Constantly having to zoom in, scroll around and wait for content to resize itself can seriously detriment the user experience. With the amount of people that browse the web on mobile devices today, it’s important to ensure that you’re ready for them.
Having a responsive design not only improves the user experience of your largest audience, but also improves your Google search engine ranking as websites that aren’t optimized get lower preference especially on mobile. Ensure that your website works on screens of all sizes, whether it’s through responsive design or a plugin that creates a mobile version of your website.
Finally and perhaps most importantly, you need to consider all of the above aspects when designing your landing page. It should be clean, concise, attractive and free from intrusive content such as auto-playing videos and audio. If there’s too much content or everything is cluttered, you’re immediately making the wrong impression.
Ensure that you’re only including information that really needs to be there. Aim to make every line of text as short as possible while still effectively and coherently communicating your message. Your homepage should act as a quick introduction with links to other pages on your site that contain what your target audience needs.
The internet is key to running a successful business in the modern world, but its evolution is swift and continuous. Keeping up with current trends and frequently analyzing the way you present your brand online is essential to your success. Maintain a good balance between functionality and creativity, keep it simple and don’t stop improving.
